Excerpts from Reviews:

Nicola Smith, Valley News:
"...What happens when the family history you thought you knew and understood turns out to be something quite different? Something darker, more complex, with long, tangled roots in events that happened decades earlier, in that murky era of pre-history before you were born.

That’s the issue confronting the protagonist of Nora Jacobson’s astute, nuanced and thoughtful new film My Mother’s Early Lovers, a movie shot on location in the Upper Valley, with a screenplay written by Jacobson and Vermont writer Sybil Smith, on whose short story the film is based.

How many of us can point to a written document that lays it all out for us, in pen and ink? Why did your mother and father argue so furiously? See page 61 for root cause. Why does your father treat your brother so harshly? Look at the entry for June 16, 1955.

Most of us just stumble along, working it out as we go, looking for pinpricks of light in a long, dark tunnel.

There are a number of better known filmmakers who could learn something from the subtlety with which Jacobson elicits emotion from the actor, how unfussily and deftly she sets up scenes and shots, the quiet interplay between the actors--a look here, a reaction there. It’s also the sign of a real filmmaker: someone who knows that the true drama takes place on the actor’s face, in the actor’s gestures, not necessarily in what is said... My Mother’s Early Lovers is a remarkably fine first dramatic feature from someone who seems to have all the instincts of a born film-maker..."

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M.D Drysdale, The Herald of Randolph:
"...My Mother’s Early Lovers is a fictional account based on a true document: The discovery of old diaries, which revealed unsuspected events, both light and dark, in the family history of Maple, the young woman who’s the protagonist....a lovely first feature film with some first-rate acting performances. As a Vermont film, it’s true to the actual, recognizable state around us while true also to the actual recognizable struggles of human beings everywhere. It takes place in a couple of cramped old clapboard rural houses like many of us grew up in, as well as in the lovely surrounding countryside. It takes place, too,in a cramped and difficult family landscape--yet one which is in the end lit by love. Beware, though: That light comes not in a Hollywood floodlight but in flickering shafts like late afternoon sun through the trees....

Jacobson’s response to her material--as seen in the fictional characters in the story--is richly ambiguous. In refusing to make a sociopolitical statement with her movie, Jacobson frees our hearts to range over the full panoply of human emotions and dilemmas, facing unblinkingly the essential inexplicableness of much of life, magnified by the lens of family.

...Jacobson gets some wonderful performances from her actors. Sue Ball as Maple is marvelous in a complicated role. Far from just telling us the story, Maple participates in it, molds it, interprets it, and in so doing becomes herself memorable.

As Louise, the mother-in-younger-days, Molly Hickok is lovely to look at and believable in dealing with the difficult hand that she is suddenly dealt.

As Maple’s hard-bitten father, veteran actor Gilman Rood is solid. Geraldine Jacobson, a former New York actress, who is the director’s mother, has a luminous outing as the eccentric Mrs. Fricket.

Good as the women are, though, they seem out shown sometimes by the men; particularly by George Woodard’s Calvin, Maple’s beloved, but alcoholic younger brother, who becomes the dramatic center of the movie.

Woodard, a Waterbury dairy farmer who has spent several years in Hollywood, is well known in Vermont as a great hand for humor, but this is his first big dramatic role. His performance in “My Mother’s early Lovers” is so electrifying, so extraordinary in every detail, that it will be talked about for many years.

And then there’s Rusty Dewees, who captivated Vermont state audiences as “The Logger” last year. Dewees here takes a minor role, elevates it, and makes it memorable. This is, after all, a movie partly about masculine sex appeal--and when Woodard and Rusty Dewees appear on screen together, they make Brad Pitt just a blow-dry memory."

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Rick Kisonak, Seven Days, Burlington, VT:
"... I saw several movies over the past few days, many of them with budgets well into the millions, and the most captivating by far was a humble shoestring of a marvel by Vermont filmmaker Nora Jacobson.

... The picture adapts Vermont author Sybil Smith’s autobiographical memoir and stars Sue Ball in the role of a young woman whose mother has died, and whose father has decided to put the family home up for sale. In going through some of her mother’s possessions, she discovers a diary written in the woman’s youth and, through it, a side of her the daughter never knew existed.

The film, in fact, tells two stories. One, in black and white, traces the path which leads the writer of the diary through a series of relationships and ultimately into a marriage with a disturbing secret just beneath its surface. The other takes place in the present and deals with the family’s surviving members, their various dependencies and dysfunctions, and the daughter’s determination to come to terms with the truth at the heart of the family’s troubles. The stories are mirror images of one another, and Jacobson proves deft in the way she weaves the two together.

That’s perhaps the element I appreciated most about the picture, too. The surefooted and always surprising way it unfolds, opening petal by petal, like a flower of evil. Just when you think you know these people and have gotten a grip on their lives, Jacobson takes you a little further in, a little closer to the heart of the tragedy, and everything suddenly takes on new and darker meaning. Despite cheery signposts like Robert Frost paperbacks and “Vermont” sweatshirts, this is a psychic trip down shadowy and unfamiliar back roads."

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Tim Brookes, Rutland Herald:
"...Montpelier is still a place of magic. The rest of the country may have settled for a Wal-Mart state of mind, but there’s something about that small burg of unreformed dreamers and rascals that attracts eccentricity and means that anything can happen.

I found myself at the Savoy (theater) over the weekend entirely by default, just wanting to spend the night out with my wife, whose name I can barely remember in these hectic days, not knowing anything about “My Mother’s Early Lovers” except that if it was at the Savoy, it was probably worth seeing. ... It’s a wonderful film, made on three-quarters of a shoestring by the Norwich writer/director/producer Nora Jacobson, based on a novella of the same name by the Norwich author Sybil Smith, cast entirely (bar one actress) using Vermonters, and thus allowing two kinds of pleasure: that of seeing a subtle, thoughtful, funny, valuable film, and that of seeing all kinds of faces I haven’t seen since I was reviewing film and theatre in the mid-eighties....

The plot, in brief: Maple (Sue Ball), a nurse and poet who never much got on with her mother and felt haunted by her death, finds her mother’s letters and diary when her father, Wendell (Gil Rood) puts the family cabin up for sale. The mother’s light-hearted adventurousness leads her into trouble, though; and in the parallel universe of the present, Maple’s brother Calvin (George Woodard) is drinking himself to destruction. ... This is no Vermont Gothic. Instead, in a remarkably skillful and graceful series of scenes that are often more like grace notes, we see small acts of kindness leading to small corners turned.

I was lucky enough to see the Saturday showing, and therefore to meet George Woodard after the show. He reminded me of the young Mel Gibson in the sense that while on screen he appeared taciturn, a man of action: In person he was self-conscious and almost giddy.

“Anyone want to ask me how many cows I milk?” he began. “All right,” someone said, “How Many?” “As many as needs it!” he laughed. (Later, he confessed to 25). His performance as Calvin is all the more extraordinary because (he claims) he has never been drunk in his life (“It’s hard enough getting up at four in the morning to milk cows, without having a hangover”), and he doesn’t smoke. ...

It turns out that he was (accidentally) responsible for the best line in the film. Towards the end, Calvin staggers drunk into Maple’s cabin and, after collapsing on the floor, he recites with her the Serenity Prayer. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can,” he says drunkenly, “and the wisdom to remember the rest of this rural expletive deleted.” He claimed that he had genuinely forgotten the rest of the prayer, but the mistake works perfectly, and Jacobson was smart enough to leave it in.

It’s always a pleasure to see Rusty Dewees and Diary Johnson, playing a friend of Calvin’s and his estranged wife, respectively. Jacobson credits Rusty (whom she had never seen act before, which is sort of a compliment, really) with the very smart decision to underplay his character. He has such a big jaw, such big shoulders, that it’s easy for him to overwhelm whoever is acting next to him, but here he is just right, sexy without being immense. His side-long glance reminded me of what Tom Waits might have looked like if he’d lived a lifetime of good nutrition.

Perhaps the most welcome surprise was Gil Rood, who has been acting around Burlington for two decades; and whom I had always thought of as slightly wooden, but here shows considerable flexibility, at times tyrannical, at times tender as Wendell, the unregenerate patriarch of the family. “I tried to make him just be, rather than act,” Jacobson said. "I’d tell him, 'Don’t act. Don’t push.' He used to call me 'Mother.'"

Just as surprising is the inclusion of Gil’s son Dudley, a contractor in the Burlington area who had never acted before, as Wendell in his agrarian-socialist youth--bearded, bare-chested, unwilling to take no for an answer.

And while we’re on multi-generational casting: ghosting through the action is one of Maple’s patients, an elderly woman who has attempted to commit suicide but ends up living out of her aging car and writing, another example for someone saving herself by being able to step back and make something of the turbulence of her life. The actress, who is one of the few people who has ever struck me as having an intelligent nose, turned out to be Nora’s mother, Geraldine, who acted in New York as a young woman before moving to Vermont, marrying and working as a speech pathologist....She told us that the last time she acted was in 1968,” Nora said...."

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John Nelson, Dutchess County, New York:
"... My Mother’s Early Lovers is a poem from Jacobson about parenthood and its responsibilities. The story itself is an odd cross between “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Sling Blade.” But it is in the writing (and some of the performances) that we get the message that the older we get, the more we resemble our parents--no matter how we feel about them. Maple’s life takes twists that almost mirror events in her mother’s young life, and her brother Calvin has become the man their father was and is. With Calvin, though, he is not pleased with the plate he has been given and his hopelessness is reflected when the question is asked, “Can one really escape the ills of the world?”

The cast has the same sort of odd familiarity that the characters do. Ball looks like a replica of Debra Winger and Woodard reminded me of David Strathairn. As Maple, Ball carries the brunt of the film as both its narrator and its core. Her forlorn look turns clairvoyant as she begins to understand who her mother was. Woodard has the daunting task of playing a frightening drunk and he takes it on with wild abandon. His scenes with Ball are refreshing and very sibling-like. My favorite part of the film involved him at an open mike playing music and being interrupted by his drunken father. The rest of the cast holds the firmament of the film together, giving it its backwoods luster and atmosphere.

David Ferm’s music consists of strange-sounding chords played on an overplayed guitar and is a needed addition to the story, giving it a common ground to fall back on. ... You will enjoy this film--its simple-minded and sweet story and non-celebrity, next-door-neighbor-looking actors--because it is at its core a modest slice of life."

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